Survey: Classic films preferred in horror movie category

London
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Classic horror shows, including The Shining, The Exorcist and Psycho, top the favourite scary movies by British film lovers, according to a survey done by Lovefilm.

Coinciding with the Halloween holiday, the British rental and movie streaming website Lovefilm interviewed about 5,000 British movie fans to find out about their favourite horror films. The movies “The Exorcist" (1973) and “The Shining” (1980) topped the preferences as the best scary movies in history.

Linda Blair's performance as the devil’s possessed, head-twisting Regan was voted the best horror movie victim, beating Jack Nicholson and his role as crazed, axe-wielding writer Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s classic. "The Shining" was also voted as including the scariest site in horror films, the haunted Overlook Hotel. Additionally, Jack Torrance's “Here's Johnny” utterance in The Shining (1980) won as the best horror movie one-liner.

A particularly scary movie scene, that in the science fiction film "Alien" (1979) in which an alien monster comes out from the stomach of a space explorer, was voted the most terrifying of all time.

In the category for scariest sound effects in a horror film won the sequence heard in the famous shower scene with Janet Leigh in the film "Psycho" (1960) directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Lovefilm's survey refers specifically to certain aspects of the movies that were particularly attractive to viewers. The Internet Movie Data Base website (IMDB) however, considering the preferences of over 100000 movie fans on these 4 top scary films, lists Psycho ahead (8.7/10), followed by The Shining and Alien (both with 8.5/10) and The Exorcist (8.1/10).